Making authenticity a priority has obvious benefits for your psychological health and your spiritual balance. It gives you focus to make sure you don’t over-schedule yourself with too many activities. It helps you establish your priorities and stick with them. But it also brings an unexpected benefit.

Living an authentic life means taking charge of your goals and the standards you set for success. It means letting go of concerns about status, which can be a huge drain on resources and a huge pressure on you.

Status goals may push you to seek promotions to get more responsibility and higher pay. Authentic goals may free you to see that you enjoy working directly with or for clients but you don’t enjoy managing people.

Status goals may have you striving to afford the European luxury car. Authentic goals may free you to be content with a late model used American or Japanese car.

Status goals may tell you the older boat you have should be replaced with a new, more powerful jet boat. Authentic goals may help you realize you go boating so rarely it works better for you to sell your boat and rent one occasionally with a group of friends.

Status goals may convince you that you need a graduate degree to be prepared to start a part-time small business as a contractor or consultant. Authentic goals may show you the path to develop your expertise in a more suitable field through your passion and natural curiosity.

Status goals may pressure you to trade up to the larger house in the newer neighborhood. Authentic goals may help you see that paying off your mortgage more quickly and then investing the equivalent of a mortgage payment will bring you more financial freedom and peace.

Status goals may have you going with friends every week to the newest movie theater paying top dollar for tickets to the latest movies. Authentic goals may have you planning which movies you actually want to see and choosing to see them for a discount at matinee times or at older theaters.

The money, time, effort, and other resources you expend pursuing your authentic goals will feel like a good value, not like a huge sacrifice. The money, time, effort, and other resources you expend pursuing status goals will often feel wasted.

You can’t get enough of what you don’t really need. It’s in the U2 song Stuck In A Moment. It’s also in a lot of the literature on addiction treatment, so much so that I can’t recall where I first heard it, although my best guess is from John Bradshaw.

When you pursue things that don’t really suit your authentic self, you experience scarcity and feel deprived. When you pursue things that align with your authentic self, you feel abundant.

That’s a liberating idea.

In ancient times – a little more than a century ago – education was about personal development. It was about exploring a variety of exciting things just because they were enjoyable. It was focused on finding ways to entertain the mind and the spirit through history, culture, art, music, and math.

Now education has become a factory to roll out little job-bots. Those poor little job-bots will graduate from high school and college this month and line up for their job-boxes. Want to make a difference?

Join the revolution and tell your favorite graduates that they can make a living without a job. Give copies of Barbara Winter’s Making a Living Without a Job: Winning Ways For Creating Work That You Love to spark their entrepreneurial spirit. This is a powerful introduction to moving from employee (and student factory) thinking to self-directed entrepreneurial thinking.

While you’re at it, tell your favorite graduates they don’t have to flatten their dreams and squeeze their expansive and creative lives into ruts and boxes. Throw in copies of Barbara Sher’s Live the Life You Love: In Ten Easy Step-By Step Lessons. This radical (and possibly dangerous) book affirms the power of long-term dreams. It not only opens the way to incorporate one’s gifts, talents, and passions in an intentional life plan, it makes it clear that it is imperative that each person do so. It is the way to be most successful, and the way to give the greatest benefit to others.

As long as we’re being radical, let’s get downright anarchistic. Include a copy of Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. This book stands firmly on logic and common sense and shows “the road less traveled” to financial peace. He teaches outrageous ideas, like living on less than you earn, avoiding consumer debt, paying cash and getting good deals, and setting aside a little money each month now to build a wealthy future.

At this point, you have doomed your graduates to seeing beyond the rut. If they can make a living without a job, they are not subjugated by employers. If they can live the life they love, they can exercise free will and choose their own paths instead of following the crowd. If they embrace a total money makeover, they will avoid the shackles of monthly payments and watch their money grow, instead of watching their debt load grow.

They will be equipped to start living life on their own terms. If they truly have that kind of freedom, you might as well give them copies of Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (Classic Seuss). To job-bots marching in their ruts, this is a simple children’s book. To trailblazers who see opportunities and possibilities all around them, it is a hymn to living a full life.

Take all four books and put them together in one gift box. And maybe, just maybe, it will be the only sort of box your graduates will know.

The categories are a little jumbled this month to reflect how a lot of us have gotten our thoughts jumbled. We think we need money in order to play, and to have money we need to “work” – implying a certain level of drudgery and sacrifice. We formulate it like this:

I need a j-o-b that pays more than my bills. Whatever I make above that I can use to play. The more I make the more I can play.

What happens when we take charge of the relationships between work, money, and play?

Take away money as a precursor to play and you’re left looking for ways to play that cost little or nothing. It brings to mind a frequent complaint from older parents and grandparents who say children today don’t know how to entertain themselves. They don’t have to use their imaginations because they have electronic toys, video games, and movies they can play in their homes. How can your imagination help you play without spending a lot of money?

Barbara Winter tells a great story about a friend who called her and, though a little hesitant to ask, invited her to come over to paint with water colors. It wasn’t two trained artists working on pieces to sell. It was two women who enjoyed something as girls who finally decided to give it another go. As a fun evening, it was a spectacular success.

Think about the standard entertainment script: dinner and a movie. Is it enjoyable time with your friends and family, and is it worth the money? Often it’s not. What about movies on DVD at the library? It’s doubtful anyone has seen every movie available, even if you limit the list to all the movies considered classics. A Bette Davis or Clark Gable marathon with a “floor picnic” (around here that’s fast food eaten with a beach towel as the blanket on the living room floor) might be a lot of fun and give you many more opportunities to talk to each other.

Museums often have a day of the week or month that you get in for free or nearly free. Community theater companies put on enjoyable presentations for a low ticket price, and if you volunteer you might get in free. Unlike golf, tennis can be played at many public locations for free. You need a companion, a racket, and some tennis balls. Find the right person and he or she will provide all of them! Someone who wants to try out sailing can start meeting people at the marina and offer to learn by helping crew on some outings. You’ll probably sail a lot more than the people who spend a bunch of money to buy a boat, rent a slip, and keep up with maintenance!

Can you work without making money? Trust me! You can, especially when you’re starting a new business. But there are other ways to work without pursuing money. You can volunteer part of your time. You can do extra things at a j-o-b to learn more and get more experience. You can write without publishing, or without seeing a short-term possibility to publish. You might eventually get paid, but it’s not the main motivation. The work itself is.

Many people who write, or paint, or create things they might eventually sell do it for the enjoyment. They have already blurred the line between work and play. They have discovered work, a productive activity with a goal in mind, can be as enjoyable as play. Stories abound about people taking college classes for the joy of learning, then winding up with enough credits to get a second degree. The degree may lead to a new career or open additional doors. The experience of being involved in learning something for fun may lead to offers to work in the field.

The big question, it seems, is How can I play and make money? The ideal answer is to find a way to do work that crosses into play. It will be productive, like work, but involve the imagination and a sense of wonder and a lot of enjoyment.

A friend wrote an update to our creative career forum that in her new job she is able to organize the office, their paperwork, and some of their daily operations. She loves it! This is something she has looked forward to doing for years, and she sees it as something she “gets” to do, not something she “has” to do. That may not be play for most of us, but it sure is to her.

In the trailblazer’s life, the lines between work, money, and play will get blurry. Sometimes they might even disappear. Trailblazers find a way to do what they were born to do, so it flows from their gifts and passions and ignites their souls. They find people who will benefit from what they do, the ones who need what they have to offer. Those people are happy to pay for it.

May it be so for all of us.

How much is it costing you to stay in a job you hate but think you can’t leave?

On the surface, you might think you’re stuck. You have a mortgage or rent payment, a car payment, and a pile of bills that take every bit of money you earn. There doesn’t seem to be much, if anything, left over at the end of the month.

When you think about leaving a frustrating or even soul-sucking job you worry that you won’t find a job that pays as much. You can’t see a way to make it on less money. You can’t see a way to save up money to pay off bills or build up a cushion to get through the transition.

When you’re looking at how much you spend each month, try adding a new category: Misery. Here’s how I would like you to see this. When we are unhappy with work and only stay for the level of salary, we tend to compensate for our misery with the money.

It can be things that seem small, like thinking I’m too stressed out by this job to go home and cook. If I’m wearing myself out for this salary, then we’re going to have take-out or eat out a lot.

It can be something bigger, like I spend so much time commuting for this high-paying I’m going to buy myself a really nice care.

It can be little choices that pile up. How many times do you think That’s kind of expensive, but I can afford it. And I’m working so hard I deserve it. Giving yourself permission to buy something nice you can really afford is fine. But buying things you can barely – or not really – afford to try to compensate for your unhappiness with your life gets very expensive quickly.

What other expenses are specific to that job? Do you eat out for lunch because it’s expected? Or do you eat out to treat yourself because it’s a nice break in a frustrating day? If you were happier at work, that expense might disappear. Think about it and decide if it goes in the “Misery” category.

Do you have to wear clothing that needs to be dry-cleaned? How much do you spend on the commute to and from work? Are you buying three-dollar coffee when you could brew your own coffee if you had a better schedule?

How much is it costing you to keep the high paying job that’s making you miserable? When you see all the ways you’re spending money to be able to keep the job, or to compensate for the misery of the job, you get a much truer picture of what you are earning.

Can you get a less expensive car? Would you be willing to live in a more modest home if it helped you have a life with more satisfaction, enjoyment, and peace?

When you look at all the ways you would be willing and able to pay less if you were in a more satisfying job, you get a much clearer idea of how much you need to earn.

I listen to financial advice talk shows from time to time. Two of my favorites are Dave Ramsey on the radio and Suze Orman on television.

If you’ve heard both of them, you might have noticed their ideas are different in a lot of ways. They especially differ on how to approach paying off credit card debt. When I was thinking about helpful ideas for getting rid of debt, I tried to imagine a conversation between the two of them.

Dave Here’s how you pay off your debts. List them in order from lowest balance to highest. Make minimum payments on everything, and then pay as much as you can extra on the lowest balance. When that one’s paid off tackle the next one up. Now you’re paying the minimum payment for the paid off loan, plus the minimum payment for the next loan, plus any other money you can manage.

Suze That’s ridiculous! You should pay off your credit cards by tackling the one with the highest interest rate first. Anyone who tells you any other way is wrong! Mathematically it just makes sense to pay off the high interest loans first.

Dave Ma’am, if we were doing math we wouldn’t have credit card debt. Personal finance is 20% math and 80% behavior. We need some incentive. Paying off the lowest balance first is the quickest way to feel the excitement of making progress. As you pay off bills, you have more and more available to pay on the next one on the list. It gets exciting!

Suze I want people to pay off their credit card debt, too. What I really like to see people do is transfer all their high interest balances to a lower interest card so they save money. Then they can have one low rate credit card to build up their FICO credit score.

Dave I don’t like to see people opening new credit card accounts. You don’t borrow your way out of a debt problem. I want people to focus on paying off their debts one buy one, and then chop up their credit cards and never go into debt again! If you play with snakes you’re gonna’ get bit.

Suze I knew you were crazy! You can’t just chop up your credit cards and close the accounts! Your FICO score will go down and you won’t be able to borrow money at good interest rates!

Dave When you learn to save up and pay cash, a FICO score doesn’t really matter. Get rid of those credit cards! No more debt!

Suze Where did you come from?!

The fun of this kind of imagined exchange is that two well-respected experts with very different points of view both say basically the same thing—credit card debt is harmful to building wealth long-term. Follow the advice of either one and you wind up at the same place.

Your credit card debt is paid off.

Then if you build up an emergency fund in a savings account, you’ll never feel like you need to use a credit card again.

Disclaimer: This is a fictitious representation meant to characterize different opinions on paying credit card debt. In truth, it can be hard to know what either of the people named is going to say at any given time!

You might be thinking, Christmas just ended. Why are you talking about a Cash Christmas now?Because right now, when your credit card bills from the last Christmas are coming in, is the time to start planning to have a Cash Christmas!

Why would anyone bother to save up money for Christmas instead of using credit cards?

Christmas on Credit

* Set “target” amounts to spend on each person but go over your target—a little bit at a time—so often that you’re shocked by how much you overspend.
* Plan to have all of last Christmas’ purchases paid off by next Christmas.
* Last-minute “extra” gifts and gifts for people you overlooked are easy to buy on credit. Hard to pay off, but easy to buy!

Cash Christmas

* You set definite amounts to spend, and if you want to spend more on one person you have to spend less on another, or come up with the cash from somewhere else (like your food budget).
* You save up all year for Christmas gifts so when you’re done shopping you’re done paying.
* Last-minute “extra” gifts don’t seem as important, and when you think about gifts for “overlooked” people it’s a lot easier to decide if you really want to buy a gift, give homemade treats, or just plan to spend time together. You focus on giving gifts out of a sincere desire to give instead of guilt. If you realize you really did overlook someone, find the cash in your budget somewhere else, buy a gift, and put the person on your list for next year.

How Can I Do This?

For people unaccustomed to saving up, this can be a new and strange experience. Plan your list right now for next Christmas. Use last Christmas’ purchases as a benchmark.

Did you include people you really don’t normally exchange gifts with? Did you overlook anyone and need to include them this year? Get everyone on your list, including your children’s teachers and any gifts or treats you will buy for co-workers, colleagues, or fellow members in organizations. Be thorough!

Using the amount you spent for each last year, decide if it was too much, too little, or just right. Decide what you will spend this year.

Total up your list. Divide your total by twelve. You need that much money each month to reach your target. For example, if you need $1,000 you have to put aside about $85 per month. $50 per month will grow to $600.

Where can you save it? In a savings account if you have one. In a cookie jar, envelope, or sock drawer if that works for you.

If you think ahead and plan what you will buy, you can save money. Since the money is accumulating, you can buy gifts early when you see things on sale in the summer or fall.

If you really do manage to pay off last Christmas by December, when you give out gifts at the end of this year you will be Christmas-debt free! That’s a huge gift you will give yourself.

Pursuit of Happiness: Money

Many experts on personal finance, money management, and building wealth teach a common theme. They say giving is an important part of the foundation to a healthy relationship with money.

I say “relationship with money” because they write about money as a force, something along the lines of a river. It can be directed and respected but not trapped—at least not for long. Doesn’t that sound wacky? I know! It’s kind of hard to wrap your brain around.

But they each learned this principle before becoming wealthy, so it’s a core of what they teach about understanding money. They say grabbing at money, chasing after it, or holding to it tightly tends to cause it to flee. Respecting it, directing it wisely, and sharing it with others brings more to you.

If you’re still not ready to accept this idea, there are many other sound reasons that giving can be a good part of your life on a regular basis. Don’t give just so your teenagers can have iPods, cell phones, and cars. How about these not-as-wacky thoughts about the value of giving?

· Giving helps put your situation in perspective when you start thinking about other people’s needs.

· Giving promotes gratitude in you.

· Giving what you can, even a little once in a while, builds a habit and mindset of giving.

· Giving makes it easier to see the difference between wants and needs.

· Giving promotes a mentality of abundance instead of scarcity.

· Giving is a significant part of many faiths and philosophical traditions because it develops maturity and character.

· Giving is fun!

One of the big questions that comes up whenever you decide to change your life is, “Can I afford to do this?” This is especially true when you’re thinking about a career change or becoming a stay-at-home parent. There are lots of recommendations about cutting back to save up for a period of lower or unpredictable income, or to afford training or education. But they assume people know what they’re doing with their money each month. Most of us don’t.

I started doing a basic budget decades ago for one main reason: to see how much money I could spend on fun after I paid the bills! If we were thinking about buying something, we compared the payment to the money left over after the basics. “Can we afford it?” meant, “Can we afford the payment?” That included taking four or five months to pay for a VCR bought on the credit card.

With pay increases my wife and I paid off student loans and started paying extra on the mortgage. We even started setting aside money for retirement. Finally, piecing together different bits of advice (much of it conflicting), we paid off the credit card debt and started saving up to buy things instead of putting them on credit. We aren’t the greatest role models, but we use a budget to reach important financial goals. Here’s what we’ve learned:

• Start by listing the known things, like rent or mortgage, utilities, food, car payments and insurance, and gas.

• Develop categories for other predictable expenses, like buying clothes or eating out or fees for children’s sports or activities.

• Track your actual expenses for the past three to six months. (Suze Orman says that people consistently underestimate their expenses when she is working with them, so count everything.)

• Look at your take-home pay. (If you get a big tax refund each year, adjust your deductions so less is withheld and more comes home.) Total the amount you bring home each month: four weeks if paid weekly, two pay periods if paid semi-monthly or bi-weekly.

• Total all the things you have to pay, including rent or mortgage, car payments, insurance, and minimum payments on outstanding consumer debt. Look at how much is left over.

• Compare your history of spending by category to the amount of money available. If you use a credit card to help you spend more than you bring home, that’s a warning sign! Your clothes, food, eating out, entertainment, and “fun money” cannot total more than you have or you’ll go deeper in debt.

• Plan all your spending for the coming month. Dave Ramsey calls this “giving every dollar a name.” This is where intention comes into play. You make a commitment to yourself, and you and a spouse or partner commit together, not to spend money if it’s not in the budget. Budget everything, including “fun money” and entertainment, until every dollar is targeted.

• Follow the budget and keep track of your spending. Since utilities can fluctuate, wait until those bills come in before you spend much “fun money.” You might have to move money from there to help cover a high electric bill. Ouch!

• Review your budget towards the end of the month and start planning for the next month. Adjust your numbers as you get used to patterns. Plan extra for groceries if you’re having people over, and maybe adjust by doing less for entertainment that month.

At the end of three months, you’ll have a very clear idea of how much it costs to cover your basics and how much you’re spending for enjoyment. Using a budget, most people pay attention to where all their money is going for the first time. When you pay attention, you don’t spend it frivolously. It feels like a pay raise.

With your budget set you’ll be able to evaluate your priorities. You see that it’s possible to pay off debt or save up to pay for training, for a trip to explore options for your life, or to have a six-month cushion during a career transition. You budget for the basics, then for your priority, and you spend less on “fun money” or entertainment to be able to afford to pay for your dream.

It’s a short-term sacrifice with a long-term payoff. When you take charge of your money, you’ll know you can afford to pursue your dream. When you start putting money towards your dream, you put the power of intention on your side.
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NEWS FLASH! Seems this is a popular topic. Valerie Young of Changing Course just published her bi-monthly newsletter and the lead article is about lots of ways to move out of debt. It’s available on the internet. Click here. And while you’re at her site, sign up for her newsletter and check out the other resources.

One huge obstacle people often face when they’re ready to make big changes to improve their lives is money. At least, it looks like money’s the problem to most of us. We want a different job or a completely different career but need the current salary level to cover all our bills. There’s no time to go to school, even part-time, without risking the salary.

We want more family time but we think the kids will suffer if they give up the things our extra work hours can buy. We want a dramatic change, maybe moving to a new place and starting a business, but the equity in the house barely equals the balance of the mortgage and the emergency savings fund is—okay, we don’t have an emergency fund. That’s what credit cards are for, right?

When people feel stuck in a job or stuck in a pattern because they need money to change, they’re likely to give up their dreams or get desperate because of money. Sometimes we get desperate even when we have the money—at least I did. I had saved up about $30,000 to cushion the transition from business ownership to a new career when my mother and I decided to sell our preschool and child development center. Instead of following my own plan of living on the proceeds of the sale through the transition and keeping the cushion until I saw how things were going, I spent it before the sale was final.

I bought a “small business opportunity” along with my parents and set up an office and paid for some marketing. Just over a year later the parent company was crumbling, and we found out they had thousands of people in different industries who had paid them tens of thousands of dollars for different businesses that didn’t work. The Federal Trade Commission closed them down. Nearly one hundred million dollars was gone.

Boy, did I learn my lesson! The next time I paid for a scam small business opportunity, I spent lots less. I came across a business selling discounted products over the internet and pulled money from the sale of my business to buy it. Two months later I heard my first ad for Overstock, a national company doing the same thing with real success. Six more months later, that company was also taken over and closed down by the Federal Trade Commission.

Both losses were hits to our family financially, but they didn’t take us down. However, I was on e-mail lists as both companies were collapsing and heard stories of people taking $20,000 advances on credit cards and expecting to make the payments from their profits. They had no cash reserves and their current income just covered their bills. Some were retirees on small fixed incomes. They wound up in serious financial trouble.

Now I’m extremely skeptical of any opportunity that is marketed based on greed. Some do work, such as specific training in a field from a respected organization, but when the ad copy tells me I’ll be earning six figures for a four-figure investment, I cringe. I’ve seen too many people who feel trapped by debt fall on their faces borrowing even more money they can’t pay back to chase a dream of finally earning enough to catch up to their debt.

It doesn’t have to be that way! I advocate a different relationship to money, to things, and to work. Let’s discuss it here each month.